Diablo 3‘s announcement for the Nintendo Switch came on the heels of months of rumors and speculation, but it was significant nonetheless, as it marked the first Blizzard game on a Nintendo system in over a decade, and the first Blizzard game on a Nintendo console in almost twenty years.
Speaking to Game Informer, Blizzard associate producer Matthew Cederquist talked about how the port came about, and why Blizzard decided to do it at all, also revealing that when they made the pitch for the game to Nintendo to begin with, they were “pumped” and “excited”.
“The Switch came out and we were all playing it,” he said. “Some of us were playing Mario and some of us were playing Zelda, and we were kind of thinking to ourselves, ‘We’ve got a pretty good game for this.’ We all travel a lot and we were sitting on a plane and thinking, “We’ve got the perfect game for the Switch.’ So we brought the pitch to Nintendo and they said, ‘What have you guys been waiting for?’ They were pumped. They were as excited as us.”
Apparently, the porting process wasn’t difficult. We’d known this for a while, of course, but Blizzard explained exactly why in this interview, citing the already done PlayStation port as having covered a lot of the groundwork and hard work they would otherwise have needed to have done.
“We did most of the work a few years ago when we moved the game to PlayStation, so, by-and-large, thousands of hours have already been spent getting this right for console,” said senior producer Pete Stilwell. “Where we did spend time playtesting and iterating on the game was with the Joy-cons. Individual joy-cons have fewer buttons, so we replaced the second joystick’s roll with the Joy-con’s flick.”
On the whole, it seems like it’s a quality port, which took the time to consider the unique functionality that the Switch offers. Diablo 3: Eternal Collection launches on Nintendo Switch later this year. It is out now for PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.
